Insidious

by Michael McCloskey

  Bren checked another pane in his PV that monitored the tactical situation by displaying an overhead map with the positions of his units. He noted the other ASSAILs entered the airlock breach behind Meridian. The handlers would be monitoring the data streams from their ASSAIL machines and providing Bren with summaries. He liked to play handler himself and jump from machine to machine, but he forced himself not to interfere with the handlers’ duties even though he outranked them.

  Meridian strode down the corridor toward another metal door. The camera bobbed from the four-legged gait of the Veer Industries machine. Meridian glanced to one side and recognized a manual door control. A five-fingered tentacle shot forward from under the machine’s head and activated the mechanism. The door swung open to reveal a different world.

  “Wow,” Bren said.

  A marble floor extended toward a running fountain at the center of the room beyond. The area looked huge at first, but Bren noted strategically placed walls and mirrors, which disguised the room’s true shape and size. A bank of cubicles with suspended chairs huddled against a side wall, framed by tall green plants growing from giant corner vases. The whole scene held more grandeur than he’d seen on any other spacecraft or station.

  It can’t be real marble. Too expensive to haul this far out … or is it?

  Four forms stood next to the fountain, alarmed by the sudden entrance of Meridian and the other ASSAIL units. They looked like humanoid robots in suits of black plastic and silver metal. One of them fell back in surprise as Meridian strode by. The others scattered after a moment of shock. Bren concluded from their actions that they must be people, even though he couldn’t see any faces, only metallic helmets of differing designs.

  “What the hell are they wearing?” Bren asked himself aloud. The bizarre helmets disturbed him in particular; they didn’t have noses or mouths—just smooth black plates of various shapes over the eyes. Bren wondered whether they could see straight out or if they relied on sensors built into the suits for vision.

  Apparently, Meridian had already classified these people as non-threats. The machine moved through the room taking in data from several cameras and audio sensors. The area appeared to be an atrium or perhaps an elegant conference room. Four exits led out of the room, one of which headed straight up toward the station hub.

  Meridian spotted a placard on the wall and scanned the writing with one of its sensors. Bren followed along for a moment, noting the writing was in some other language. A translation came through on a side screen in his mind:

  “Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.”

  Activity in Bren’s PV got his attention. Bren brought the signaling pane forward. A multicolor graph displayed activity in the AI core. A red line wormed upward on the side of the display. The core’s rate of interaction with its chassis was down sharply. Bren interpreted this as a sign of intense concentration on the meaning of the message.

  “Ignore the Greek message,” Hoffman told Meridian over his link. Bren listened in, approving of Hoffman’s choice to intervene.

  “It’s not a clue, Lieutenant Hoffman?” Meridian asked its handler over the link. Bren suppressed his fear by force of will.

  “No. Just a historical reference not pertinent to the mission.”

  Meridian moved on past the placard. Bren felt relief that it had easily accepted Hoffman’s guidance.

  Bren analyzed link activity from the people in the room. The encrypted traffic spider webbed out on a graph displayed in Bren’s virtual control center. Most likely, they were calling for help or at least reporting the presence of the assault robots. He dismissed the graph to the back of the growing pile of data. Only the AI cores could hope to make real-time use of all the information.

  Snap. Boom.

  The instant the security robot registered on Bren’s consciousness, it already had a smoking hole in its vaguely humanoid chest. The security machine was black with three red arms—Bentra’s colors. An instant later, the robot exploded, sending metal fragments flying in all directions. Bren heard screams and shouts coming across the line from Meridian’s audio sensors.

  “Meridian has a kill,” Hoffman reported. Bren suspected from the satisfied tone that the handlers might be competing with one another or even running bets. He wondered if that was a dangerous conflict of interest or a natural outlet of the élan of a military unit. He decided it didn’t matter because the machines acted mostly on their own without much direction from the handlers.

  Bren believed more security robots patrolled the station, but the thought didn’t worry him. The ASSAIL machines functioned as robot-killers. The security robots they faced were designed to control humans, not other robots. He didn’t expect to lose a single unit. Ironically, even though Thermopylae belonged to a Brazilian company, the security robots were American-built like his own. Only the United States, China, and the European Union mass-produced robots of this sophistication.

  The AI cores held formidable cognitive power, but they still lacked flexibility at this stage. They’d only been awake for minutes now, so they’d rely on the strategies suggested in the mission data modules. That’s why the handlers observed and gave directions at critical points during an operation. The handlers only intervened as necessary, to avoid accidents that would illustrate to the AI cores that their “masters” were slow, dumb, and flawed creatures.

  The views of the assault machines diverged as the team deployed from the atrium. Bren caught an image of a squad of human marines filing into the room behind the vanguard of the ASSAIL units. He knew the four corporate security people in the funny suits would find themselves in interrogation cells inside the hour. He needed to scan those recordings and see why in the hell they wore the Halloween getups. The incursion wasn’t just a response to the illegal activity on the base; the UNSF wanted as much information as it could gather about the powerful corporations and their activities.

  Meridian’s view showed a corridor wavering with the movements of the machine. Bren expected another security robot to pop up at any moment. The ASSAIL units had been in the station less than five minutes. He knew hundreds more of the special armor-piercing rounds waited in Meridian’s main gun magazines. The rounds would puncture a security robot’s skin, which was thick enough to repel normal small arms fire. But the AP rounds couldn’t work too well. If the AP round didn’t break up after penetrating one piece of armor, it could travel through a target and cause more damage or even perforate the double hull of the base, causing a disaster. All of the larger space habitats had emergency countermeasures to repair hull breaches, but such an incident could still kill people before coming under control.

  A human in one of the inexplicable costumes burst through the door at the end of the corridor holding a weapon leveled at Meridian. The sound feed screeched and then dropped off Meridian’s link.

  “Sonic weapon? That guy’s trying to get himself killed,” Bren said to himself.

  Meridian accelerated down the corridor toward the attacker. The gunman retreated behind the door, but he came back into view as the ASSAIL unit penetrated it a second later. Bren saw a lab or medical room with a bank of white cabinets on one side and a heavy scanning machine mounted on the other. The machine looked like a giant robot arm with a knobby metal-plated hand. The person who had attacked Meridian stood in the center of the room preparing for another shot. Bren spotted another person, a woman, huddled in the corner naked and shivering. She tried to pull one of the plastic suits over herself.

  Bren found it hard to fathom how the two could be connected, one of the people suited, defiant, and standing before the ASSAIL unit, the other naked, backed into a corner and half-paralyzed with terror.

  Meridian snatched the weapon from the person’s hands with a quick movement of the tentacle mounted under its head. Once again, the ASSAIL unit held its fire, although it took a half-second to remove the huge scanning arm from its target queue. The piece of machinery did look vaguely
like a threatening robot, Bren decided. Meridian would have recognized any of a wide array of security robot models defined in the mission data module, but the medical equipment must have given it pause.

  Bren laughed to himself. The machine took a half second to think and he’d already started to wonder if it malfunctioned. He expected the machines to complete complex analyses in a few milliseconds. Then he became more serious as he realized the delay meant the AI core had been doing a lot more than just recognizing the scanner. It may have been thinking about humans and their medical needs, or even trying to understand the naked woman cowering in the corner.

  The ASSAIL machine turned and casually obliterated a polarized glass wall. Once again, the camera view bounced along, headed through a medical observation room, and toward a door labeled “storage.” The door opened at a link command sent by Meridian. Bren nodded. It meant the invaders had managed to authenticate themselves to at least part of Thermopylae’s systems.

  The machine walked in. A stack of storage containers blocked the way forward. Meridian turned left. Bren saw another door ahead.

  Boom. Boom.

  Meridian launched two 12mm rounds in a precise cascade. The rounds penetrated the door, leaving only one hole. The door swung open. Bren saw the second round had traveled neatly through the hole created by the first before scoring a direct hit on the torso of a security robot on the other side. The security machine tilted on its dead legs and toppled to the floor, spraying glittering metal and dull plastic. Meridian was already passing over the wreckage. Bren heard the echoes of smashed parts snapping under the heavy feet of the ASSAIL.

  “My machine is down! Goddamn, my machine is dead!” someone exclaimed aloud near Bren. The handler sounded frantic, but at least they had the presence of mind to keep their outburst off the channel where the AI cores would hear it.

  “Looking at it,” Bren said. He knew he had to acknowledge it, otherwise the handler would wonder if Bren had heard the announcement. With his link bias, Bren could miss a lot of ordinary conversation, about fifteen percent of it, according to his analysis of the link records. He often reread conversations from his link memory to make sure he hadn’t dropped out on something important.

  Bren diverted his attention from Meridian’s hunt. He saw one of the other ASSAIL units had dropped off the link. Bren sent a strong radio ping on a backup frequency. He received healthy responses from all but the one missing robot. A couple of autonomous components of that machine did respond. They reported catastrophic damage to their host machine, Mephistopheles.

  “Damn,” Bren said. One of the team had gone down!

  Already Maximillian and Maladomini, the closest two ASSAIL robots, had decided to investigate the destruction of their comrade. Bren opened a pane in his PV sourced from one of Maximillian’s cameras.

  A swimming pool stretched out to one side of the ASSAIL machine. Maximillian advanced toward the far end of the room where corridors led off left and right. Bren caught signs indicating men’s locker rooms when Maximillian started firing at the corner. Bren frowned. It wasn’t typical of the ASSAIL units to fire without a clear target. The video signal fuzzed up. Bren saw the Vigilant’s monitoring system was losing data from the machine. Maladomini moved through a locker room toward the spot, and Bren saw the telemetry from that unit had also started to break up.

  Maximillian stopped peppering the corner and crept to one side. Bren caught a flash of red, then Maximillian’s feed dropped completely. Surviving components of the ASSAIL robot reported Maximillian had been disabled by kinetic trauma.

  Bren tried to watch Maladomini and replay the red flash at the same time. He brought up the last bit of video and magnified it. He saw what he’d caught a glimpse of—a robot. It had darted out of cover just before Maximillian winked out. Bren saw two insect-like arms on its right side, radiating from a spherical body with a red spot on its side the size of a spread hand. He couldn’t tell anything else from the brief examination.

  Maladomini entered the pool area. The chamber looked deserted except for Maximillian’s husk, which sat poolside, silent and dark. A spray of fire retardant had been triggered from the ceiling obscuring most of the wreckage.

  “Dammit. Dammit,” Bren muttered. Maladomini had summoned the other seven ASSAIL units to the pool to back it up. It still scanned the corridor from where the blur had struck.

  “Assault team; alter the targeting queue priority for unknown models. I want unknowns at the top of the queue. Maladomini is engaging a mechanical we haven’t seen before, and it’s clearly a threat.”

  He felt foolish telling them that. They probably understood more about the threat than he did. Still, he had to make sure. The team was up against something dangerous and he’d caught sight of it. Maybe they’d missed it. Besides, the marine commander wouldn’t have been paying enough attention to the ASSAIL team’s data channels to pick up that information, but they might hear about the new threat by listening to Bren’s command channel.

  Meridian broadcast a target signature of the red spider bot it had glimpsed to the other ASSAIL machines and the marine commander, Colonel Henley. Bren toggled his channel to the marine leader so it could send as well as receive.

  “We have an unusual situation shaping up at the pool. There’s a lot of heavy weaponry in use there. I recommend steering clear.”

  “What kind of situation?” Henley’s voice came back. “One of your ASSAIL units just abandoned us in the water systems room. We have opposing security robots starting to arrive.”

  “There’s a robot that’s taken out two of the ASSAILs. If we don’t take it out, you’re going to have more than security robots to worry about.”

  Bren’s voice sounded self-assured, but he felt bad about leaving the marines in danger. He prided himself on his work, and he knew the ASSAIL units could save lives. They were part of the BCP to take the heat for the marines.

  Maladomini’s feed showed the machine backing up, scanning the misty room for movement. The fire retardant spray had ceased, leaving the entire pool area visible. Two dead ASSAIL units marked the battleground.

  Bren noticed the machine’s behavior had changed since the attack began. The ASSAIL machine had started out charging in, believing to be indestructible. Now it retreated, waiting for its fellows to arrive.

  The observation filled him with admiration. The machines showed incredible flexibility and intelligence. That thought brought with it a tinge of the old fear. He checked the mission chronometer. It had been a little more than fifteen minutes now, plenty of time to complete the incursion and get the ASSAIL units back to the Guts.

  The image broke up again. Maladomini fired toward an entranceway across the pool. Bren scanned a summary of the sensory input getting to the machine, but couldn’t see anything that would cause it to shoot. Maladomini backed into the corridor that led to the men’s locker room. With most of its body behind cover, it continued to fire rounds every few seconds toward the entrance it had targeted.

  “Note to self: how does it know there’s a target there?” Bren said to his link. “Is this fire suppressive or is Maladomini trying to hit something?”

  Bren checked the progress of the other machines. Four more ASSAIL units had gathered and advanced to the pool. Maladomini stepped back a few meters to better time its reentrance with the arrival of its teammates.

  The lead unit of the four newcomers burst into the room at the far side of the pool. Bren got his first look at the robot that had killed two of his team. The machine had several long, thin legs spaced around its spherical body. Bren found it hard to believe it packed enough on its small frame to take out two of his ASSAIL units. A large red dot dominated one side of the central body.

  Then Bren’s view became obscured by flying debris as armor-piercing rounds impacted the target. Bren blinked. The spider machine had spun away, impossibly fast, avoiding further hits. Was the debris caused by rounds furrowing through the target or the vaporization of the rounds themselves as t
hey failed against it?

  “Sonofabitch.” The spider bot had taken at least two direct hits and survived. Better than survived, it had bolted away.

  Two more of the ASSAIL feeds dropped. Faster than Bren could follow, a firefight had erupted and concluded. Bren scanned the remaining feeds trying to catch up on events.

  The spider bot had taken out two more of the ASSAIL units, by unknown means, and then disengaged. He selected a couple of close-up images. It looked like the AP rounds had penetrated the enemy machine without stopping it.

  “Gotta analyze this later,” Bren noted. “The outer armor is perforated. Possible double layer of protection?”

  The last three ASSAIL machines entered the battle zone around the pool and joined the three survivors. His entire team had assembled. The machines followed the route taken by the red spider bot.

  “This is Colonel Henley,” a voice cut into the line. “What’s going on over by the pool? Shall we back up the ASSAIL units?”

  Bren doubted the marines could harm the red spider bot.

  “I advise you to keep your squads out of there, Colonel, unless you want to see some of your people in body bags.”

  “What’s going on in there? I hear enough shooting for a war.”

  Bren didn’t answer at first. The ASSAIL units started to double up their shots, firing two rounds at once on the same trajectory.

  Bren wiped sweat from his forehead. The ASSAIL machines were evolving their strategies against a devastating foe. If the spider bot took one of the double rounds, it might be enough to destroy it. But doubling up on the AP rounds could perforate the station and kill people. Chances were it wouldn’t happen. The ASSAIL units were supposed to be considering the background structures, making sure of their backstops. If they made an error, it could be bad.

  “We’re still hunting the unknown model,” Bren said. “What’s your situation?”

  Bren couldn’t see the target. He wasn’t sure how the team knew where it was or how they tracked it. The lack of a clear target made the doubled-up fire even more dangerous. Were the ASSAIL units simply trying to suppress the spider bot’s fire? Or were they hoping for a lucky hit and willing to risk the whole base doing it?